Characteristics of different human languages can affect the design of software. In today's networked environments national boundaries are disappearing rapidly, but the existence of different languages presents a challenge to application designers that may have to accommodate multiple language documents, user preferences, and so on. The process of creating an application that is useful to many different users with different locales and languages is called software internationalization. Such an application requires localization to customize it to the supported locales and languages.
In the global market place partial, localization of products is a successful strategy for smaller markets. Software products with some parts of their user interfaces localized are attractive to users while still being sufficiently inexpensive to justify their purchase. This is called a Multilingual User Interface (MUI).
The impact of this strategy on service providers includes a need to support document sets that are only partially localized. This may be addressed by supplementing the localized documents with documents from other languages. The combination of localized documents for a variety of products in a service platform presents a challenge when users are to be presented with desired documents (e.g. in a product support platform) and each user may have a different language preference.